Dr. Ira Helfand elected co-president of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War

Dr. Ira Helfand, former chair of the department of emergency medicine at Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton and a physician at Family Care Medical Center in Springfield, has been elected co-president of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.The Republican file photo

SPRINGFIELD - Dr. Ira Helfand, former chair of the department of emergency medicine at Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton and a physician at Family Care Medical Center in Springfield, has been elected co-president of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the recipient of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize. His election in September by the organization's International Council, meeting at Ground Zero in Hiroshima, Japan, caps a 30-year history with the organization and its U.S. affiliate, Physicians for Social Responsibility, which he co-founded in 1979.

For the past five years, Helfand has been working with senior climate scientists to help document the health and environmental disaster that would result from a limited exchange of nuclear weapons in a regional war.

"My top priority is to ensure that the grisly medical realities of nuclear war are fully understood by the public, the medical community and our political leaders," Helfand said.

Earlier this year, IPPNW released a report authored by Helfand titled, "Nuclear Famine: A Billion People at Risk - Global Impacts of Limited Nuclear War on Agriculture, Food Supplies, and Human Nutrition."

The study showed that even a small nuclear exchange, involving less than one half of one percent of the world's nuclear arsenals, would cause climate disruption, leading to worldwide crop shortages and mass starvation, especially among the 925 million people in the world who are already chronically malnourished. Helfand will travel to Vienna, Austria, this month at the invitation of the International Committee of the Red Cross for the latest in a series of consultations by the humanitarian aid agency aimed at eliminating the threat of nuclear war.

Helfand also will present expert testimony at an intergovernmental conference hosted by Norway next March on the "catastrophic humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons."